Disturbing the Dust text by Luke Devenish, Adelaide FEstival_REVIEW_March 6 1994

 

THEATRE

At Scott Theatre, Adelaide

Adelaide International Arts Festival 1994

Reviewer: Kate Herbert around March 6, 1994

This review was published in The Melbourne Times after March 6, 1994

 

 

Memory is a trickster. As we age, we remember the distant past perfectly and our recent experiences are muddy.

 

Disturbing the Dust, directed by Ariette Taylor with text by Luke Devenish, deals with the last hours of Miss Nina, a faded grand dame of the ballet played with verve and charm by Patricia Kennedy. At seventy-four, she is now re-fabricating her past in a home for the aged, accompanied by other confused and shaken elderly folk.

 

Nina, who was born Alice Pike in London, prefers the exotic and passionate memories of the Greek woman Sophia and the Italian, Maria. This obsession creates the most extraordinary theatrical moment of the production in which actors, stories and characters from Calabria, Greece, London and Australia merge and become interchangeable.

 

The play is charming and impressionistic. Characters appear and disappear from Nina's vision. Action is stylised, almost choreographic, displaying Taylor's own dance background.

 

There are moments when the abstraction is overdone. Balletic movement, romantic watery lighting, cosmic music pall at times. A most effective scene, however, is the recurrent rush to the Underground in the London blitz.

 

Kennedy is supported by a strong and versatile ensemble which justifiably allows her the limelight.  Mary Sitarenos has a quiet dignity as Sophia, Malcolm Robertson is delightfully offensive as the "slurper" and David Tredinnick demonstrates his range in several roles.

 

In memories as in dreams we are often observers of the action. Significant others are stronger presences than the self. This has created problems theatrically because the protagonist, Alice/ Miss Nina, is sketchily drawn and so never really gains our sympathy. She is rather a narrator who, unlike the authorial voice of a novel gives little detail of herself.

 

We could afford to see more of Nina's own passion for dance. We should care more about her predicament, her past and her struggle with the dramatically awkward image of the Angel of Death.

 

Devenish's project to write a vehicle for Patricia Kennedy has been largely successful despite some structural problems with the text.

 

It is a joy to see a play with an older woman as a central character. 

KATE HERBERT   6.3.94  

350 wds